By Godwin Oritse

The Comptroller General of the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS), Mr. Adewale Adeniyi, has been chosen as the Public Sector Icon of the year by the Board of Editors of Vanguard Newspaper. In an interview he granted when a team of Vanguard editors went to present him with the Letter of the Award, he spoke about the reforms which he introduced aimed at enhancing the agency’s efficiency and aligning it with international best practices. The reforms, according to him, are beginning to yield positive results. He disclosed that among other benefits, the reforms have led to a reduction in cargo clearance time at most of the Customs Commands across the country.

Excerpts of the interview:

Congratulations on your award

I am sincerely grateful for this honor that you have done to me through the conferment of this award. And I really don’t think it could have come at a better time than now to serve as a tonic for me. I have known the Vanguard medium for several years and I know that they do not engage in frivolities. And I also know that whatever Vanguard does, there is merit in it, as evident from the publisher who has left an indelible mark in the sands of history particularly in the practice of journalism in Nigeria. He has been a personality of integrity and the highest level of professionalism which we have seen in Vanguard over the years, is a testimony to this. So I sincerely appreciate this.

What you are possibly seeing now is the projection of real power in our core mandates of revenue generation, trade facilitation, and national security. Some of those things are very obvious to see. I can assure you that in 2025 we are going to continue in that trajectory. We have an ambitious revenue figure of about N10 trillion. We were on N6 trillion in 2024. We will do the best that we can to give it our best shot. Talking about trade facilitation, we’ve launched a number of initiatives particularly the Authorized Economic Operator program, which tries to build compliance amongst our operators.

Eventually, it’s something that we expect to bring a higher level of revenue. But beyond all these things we are going to be channeling our resources to serve the communities in our areas of operation in 2025. So we’re going to launch an ambitious Corporate Social Responsibility program.

We have created a structure that will help us implement the strategies. The structure will be headed by a Comptroller of customs and we already have plans in place to do an internal launch. So we will drive it from within the service. We want officers themselves to appreciate the communities where we serve and we have identified some key areas particularly the SDGs goals and we are aligning them with what President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is doing in his priority areas. So we will be looking at areas like education, health, provision of clean water, solar energy, renewable solar energies, helping in poverty alleviation, addressing issues like malaria, and other common diseases. The scope will be in all the places where customs operates. If we talk about N10 trillion, some of these communities don’t even have a feel of it, they have never had the presence of government in some of the communities where we generate these funds. Last year Apapa generated over N4 trillion of our revenue and yet they really cannot point directly to what the government has done to support them. So we are going to identify those areas where these supports are needed and will make the maximum impact on our people. For instance, if we see a place that is synonymous with smuggling and we look at our trend we know that most smuggling activities take place at night and on weekends. We can do something around the border areas that will keep the young adults engaged or something that will either bring out their talents or give them recreation so that they will think less about crime. There is a very strong football team in Badagry which customs has supported over the years. This football team, Badagry United, is a very strong tool that I believe customs can use if we invest in it. So, if we invest in this team for example and this team gets into division one and they have a very big match, it will attract all the potential criminals to the stadium and some business would also begin to thrive around the stadium. So, these are some of the things that we want to do to make sure that they feel our impact a little bit more than before beyond what they can get from the three tiers of government.

Most Nigerians are concerned about the money the Customs is generating which is so much. Can you create a link between the need for the fund being released and the quality of life that the Federal Government deploys these funds to achieve

Yes, the way government revenue works is such that you really do not have a say on how the money is spent. There is a structure of government that handles the distribution and allocation of funds on a monthly basis which is called the Federal Accounts Allocation Committee FAAC. There is also Federal Inland Revenue, FIR, under the ages of the Federal Ministry of Finance. So, the Commissioners of Finance in all the states meet regularly and then based on the constitutional provision, decide how much percentage of total accumulated revenues that goes into the three tiers of government. But we all know that not all the various sub-nationals get enough that they need and the areas that suffer most seem to be the border communities. The border communities are the most distant communities. Most of the time they are very far from the various state capitals so, good roads, basic infrastructures, dividends of democracy don’t get to them most of the time. Beyond the borders, our biggest revenues come from the ports but most of our ports suffer congestion and access roads are bad. If you go to Port Harcourt, or Warri, the stories are the same. And so, that is how we intend to fund these projects out of that little that comes to the Nigeria Custom Service. Some of these projects actually do not need us to go to the World Bank to fund them. So we will look at the needs of some of these places and we’ll see how we can optimize the impact that our interventions can provide.

This is laudable, you can see why you won a Vanguard award. But what about the welfare of your officers because it is not a pleasant story in the Police and even in the Army?

Our workforce is the greatest asset that we have and we have been very deliberate in ensuring that we work on their welfare. 2024 was like the year of improved welfare for the average Customs officer. What we have planned to do was to effect an increase in their take home pay but that involves a lot of processes. However, there are a number of allowances that were not paid before. There are a number of new incentives that were not there before. So we looked into our books and we started working on all of that and we were able to get all of these allowances and incentives. We just make sure everybody is taken care of and there are a number of other things that we are also looking at. We’re looking at the issue of owner occupier housing scheme so that we will provide officers the opportunity to latch on to government housing projects. In 2025 for example, we are targeting about 2,000 housing units that officers can be part of and own by themselves in different parts of the country. We are also looking at our insurance either at the end of their service or when they suffer some kind of loss, accidents or death and assist them. So, on our welfare, we are improving it and I believe that we will still do better in 2025.

What do you do about cleared cargoes from the ports that are again intercepted on the roads?

Perhaps these issues were worse before than what we now have. One of the first things I did was to actually address these issues headlong. We have multiple layers of enforcement. We were able to rationalize it and we have concentrated our enforcement only in our federal operations units. So the structure of federal operations units are the ones that you see doing these layers and it is easier for them to control because I know that we have only four controllers of FOU in Nigeria and wherever we find that kind of checkpoint I know who to call. For the past one month I have been inundated with reports of checkpoints and I had to pay a scheduled visit to Apapa where I discovered that those checkpoints are no longer there. And the stakeholders actually confirmed to me that those checkpoints are no longer there. Lagos-Badagry seems to be the one that has given us the worst headache. But the situation remains the same because the creek is almost running side by side with the road. So, even if you mount 100 checkpoints there, those guys will still go underwater since we do not mount a checkpoint on water and they will come out on the road where we have no checkpoint. So now we are using geospatial intelligence to actually acquire direct satellite images and know the locations of these smugglers. And using that, we will be able to determine areas of convergence. We’re trying to do that to make sure that we reduce the number of checkpoints. But I have also discovered that, in the area of these checkpoints administrations on Seme Road, Customs cannot do it alone. There are other agencies of government that are involved. So we are also trying to work with them to achieve this. They should also see it as a problem because when international observers come along that road ,what they see is just a checkpoint, they are not in a position to determine whether this checkpoint is mounted by customs or the police. The most important thing is that it is obstructing free flow of traffic or legitimate trade. I have also challenged our Federal Operations Unit that I need data procedures from these checkpoints. It is the data that I can use to really substantiate whether we need those checkpoints or whether they are serving private interests. So we are at that stage, we are continuously reviewing our enforcement strategies so that we do not compromise the results on the platter of legitimate trade.

These unscrupulous guys are not relenting and this is what is creating problems for you and I. The government has been able to achieve a relative degree of stability on the fuel situation and we now have fuel in abundance and the price is fairly stable. But then, we have some people who are taking it out into other countries and this means they are undoing all the efforts of the government and before you know it if it is not dealt with, we will begin to have scarcity of the product again and the prices will continue to change and things like that. With our checkpoints, we could do with less. We will try and see that we put in more technology in our operations.

Part of the meeting I have had with APMT is for us to pre-scan all containers inside the port irrespective of where they are going. When we scan them inside the port, anytime the owner shows up to clear, we can also always call up the image and see what is inside. So these are the things that we are going to be doing. Hopefully in 2025 when we allow technology to lead the way, we will do less less of human interventions either in the ports or outside the ports.